CCTV by premises type
Camera count is a property of the building, not the budget. A shop with one door and a till needs four views; a farm with three outlying buildings needs sixteen and a plan for the cable. Each guide below is written for one premises type — what to cover, what goes wrong there, the cameras that suit it, and the UK rules that actually apply. We supply the equipment; you or your installer fits it.
CCTV for shops and retail units
4 and 8 cameras
Till, entrance, stockroom and rear exit — the four views a single-unit shop needs, the lens each one takes, and the ICO rules on signage, staff and fitting rooms.
Mount the till camera opposite the operator at about 2.4 m: a camera in the ceiling above the till records the top of two heads and settles nothing.
Read the shops guide →CCTV for warehouses and distribution units
8, 16 and 32 cameras
Loading bays, racking aisles, mezzanine and yard perimeter: how many channels a unit needs, what lens an aisle takes, and why storage is the binding constraint.
At 32 channels the median in-stock kit records fewer days than at eight — doubling the cameras roughly halves the days on the same drive.
Read the warehouses guide →CCTV for offices and business premises
4 and 8 cameras
Entrance, reception, comms room and car park — the views an office needs, the rooms that take no camera at all, and what the ICO expects before you monitor staff.
Cover the doors, not the desks: a camera down a bank of desks is a conversation with your staff and, in practice, a DPIA.
Read the offices guide →CCTV for construction sites and compounds
4 and 8 cameras
Gate, plant park, material store and cabin door on a compound with mains power: PIR siren cameras, a recorder nobody can walk off with, and 4G viewing.
We sell equipment and do not hire towers — for six weeks of groundworks with no power, hire; for a compound with six months left on the programme, buy.
Read the construction sites guide →CCTV for schools, academies and colleges
8 and 16 cameras
Gates, bike sheds, bin stores and reception: sizing a primary at eight cameras and a secondary at sixteen, plus the DPO, DPIA and signage duties a school carries.
There is no statutory 31-day maximum, whatever you have read — a school sets a retention period it can justify and writes it into the policy.
Read the schools guide →CCTV for restaurants, pubs and bars
4 and 8 cameras
Till, back bar, cellar, kitchen pass and beer garden — where the cameras go in licensed premises, and the retention your premises licence may already require.
A licence condition can bind you to 14 or 31 days of footage, so we publish how many in-stock kits already reach it as supplied.
Read the restaurants and pubs guide →CCTV for farms and rural property
8 and 16 cameras
Road gate, machinery shed, fuel tank and outlying buildings: long-range PoE, night filtering that stops the false alarms, and viewing where the broadband will not carry it.
Copper Ethernet is a 100 m channel — reaching the far gate is a switch, fibre or second-recorder decision, not a better-camera decision.
Read the farms guide →Home CCTV systems by house type
2, 4, 6 and 8 cameras
Front door, back door, side passage and drive: how many cameras each type of house needs, where they go, and what the ICO expects if a camera sees past your boundary.
Frame the front door so a face crosses the image at head height: a camera under the eaves looking straight down records hats and hair.
Read the homes guide →Choosing the guide that fits your site
Premises type decides more than budget does. A shop is a till and a doorway and the framing of both; a warehouse is docks, aisle lenses and the storage arithmetic that decides whether last month still exists; a school is a perimeter plus a set of data protection duties an ordinary business does not carry. Start with the guide for your building, then size the system.
If your premises is not one of the seven — a self-storage site, a care home, a garage, a place of worship — the closest guide is usually the right starting point, and the business CCTV systems page covers the general sizing rules. We supply the equipment and can specify a system from a sketch or a list of views; we do not carry out installations.